Volume 20 · Issue 2

Fall 1986

1. America (I) pl. 4 (Huntington Library).
Notice that the plate is masked at the bottom, so that the last four lines beneath
the emerging man (“The stern Bard ceas’d . . . in sick & drear lamentings”) are
invisible and that the lowest root of the tree forks five times after it leaves the main
root.
[View this object in the William Blake Archive]

MINUTE PARTICULARS

A New America

G.E. Bentley, Jr.

From time to time new Blakes turn up in surprising ways. A previously unknown poem
apparently by Blake was inscribed on a drinking glass which appeared modestly in a sale
of glassware at Christie’s in 1981, and a poem about Mrs. Butts signed by Blake along
with other Butts family memorabilia was brought to the British Library Department of
Manuscripts by a descendant of Mrs. Butts to inquire whether they were of any interest
or value. So one must be prepared to find curious things associated with Blake in the
most unlikely places and in the most remote parts of the world. And one should, of
course, greet them with a judicious blend of enthusiasm and incredulity.

In June 1984 my wife arranged for temporary insurance on her new car, and I bicycled
over to a hilly village in Toronto to pick up the document. As I was about to leave, the
insurance agent’s secretary said to me, “You were in China last year, weren’t you?”

“Yes, we were,” I confessed, surprised at the question; “why do you ask?”

“Then perhaps you can give us some advice,” she said. “You see, my husband is an
enthusiast for William Blake, and twenty years ago he bought a Blake in England which he
has never been able to identify. And when he went to the great Blake exhibition last
winter, he asked if there was anyone who could help him, and the lady [Kathy Lochnan,
Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario] told him that the person
he wanted to see was in China just then but would be back next year. But my husband
didn’t catch the name, and I didn’t think of it again until I talked to your wife a few
minutes ago.”

Well, we went over to her house to see this print or drawing, and to my astonishment
she produced a huge folder containing twenty-one designs from Blake’s
America. They were certainly prints, not drawings, and they looked very good
indeed to me (see illus. 3 & 6). Most were on pretty poor paper, but two were
colored, and they did not look like any facsimile I had seen. Unfortunately, we planned
to leave Toronto next day for fifteen months, and so an extensive examination of them
was not possible, but her husband very generously brought the prints to our house that
evening, and next morning I got up early in order to have five or six hours to inspect
them.

The raw facts are as follows:

HISTORY: (1) Bought from a London bookshop (which one not remembered) in 1963 by (2) An
Anonymous Collector.

BINDING: The leaves are now loose, between unwatermarked sheets of flimsy tissue, in a
white cardboard folder. They are printed on at least three kinds of paper, and they have
been gathered in at least three different ways: (1) Most of the leaves (pls. 1-10,
12-17), of very poor quality paper, were stabbed through two holes, about 15.2 cm from
the top and 9.5 cm apart; (2) Two of the leaves (pls. 8a, 11a), of much better quality
paper, were stabbed through two holes, 14.2 cm from the top and 8.4 cm apart, and could
never have been thus stabbed with the first group; (3) And three leaves of the better
paper (pls. 10a, 17a, 17b) were never stabbed at all. The edges are deckled, not
gilt—and therefore this cannot be the untraced Copy R which was bound in Green morocco
with gilt edges.

LEAF SIZE: 27.5 to 29.2 cm wide by 38.5 to 40.4 cm high. The poor-quality paper and the
good paper leaves show the same variations in size.

PLATE SIZES: Most of the plates are within 0.2 cm of the standard size of Blake’s
plates (this normal variation being due to such things as shrinking and stretching of
damp paper). The only irregularities are in the widths of pls. 1-2 and 11a and the
heights of pls. 11a, 15, 17, 17a, and 17b; for instance, pl. 11a is 17.4 × 23.7 cm,
whereas the norm is 16.9 × 23.4 cm.

PAPER: There are several distinct lots of paper. (1) For most of the plates (pls. 1-10,
12-17), the paper is poor, thin, with holes and almost-holes as manufactured; there are
chain-lines 2.8 cm apart, a fleur de lis, and “IV” (or, conceivably, “VI” as seen from
the other side, though the extra thickness of the side of the “V” next to the “I” makes
“IV” seem more likely). (2) One print (pl. 17a) is on good, heavy paper with chain-lines
2.7 cm apart but no watermark. (3) Pls. 8a, 10a-11a, and 17b are on good quality, heavy
paper without chain lines, and in pl. 8a is the watermark J Whatman / 1885.

PRINTING COLORS: Dull, flat Green, quite dark—pl. 17b is almost Black—on all the plates
but pl. 11, which is a rather heavy Black.

2. America pl. 4, facsimile like that in Copy B (Robert N.
Essick).
Notice that the lowest root of the tree forks only thrice after it leaves the
main root. Many of the other apparent differences in this facsimile from Copy I,
such as the flourish from the “d” of “despairing” in line 1 and the smudge above
“Serpent” in line 12, might be caused by differences in inking, but remark the clear
differences in the formation of the initial “e” in “eternal” in the last line and
the flourish after “Africa” in line 8.

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plates are correctly numbered at the bottom left in
pencil within a circle (except that there is no circle for pls. 8a, 11a, 17b); note that
this order corresponds to that in Blake Books (1977) but not to the
previously standard order in Keynes’s Bibliography of William Blake
(1921) and in the Keynes & Wolf Census (1953), suggesting that
this pencil numeration was made after 1977. There are old Brown ink numbers at the top
right corners (pl. 1), top right verso (pls. 4, 6-7, 9-10), bottom left upside down
(pls. 5, 7), and upside down on the verso (pls. 8, 14-17) on most of the plates on the
thin, poor paper, as follows:

This order corresponds to nothing known to me; in particular, it seems to be unrelated
to the similar numbers on the miscellaneous collection of genuine Blake prints including
the “Order” of the Songs (see Blake Books [1977],
pp. 338-41), which goes only as high as 103.

In addition, there is an “A” on pl. 8a and “398” on pl. 2 in pencil, and on pls. 5, 6,
7, 14, 16 there are tiny scraps of paper pasted near the old Brown ink numbers, some of
them partly torn off or visible only in offset, with a frame round “Char: II.
Cs: XII”. America is not divided into
Chapters, and I can make nothing of these notes.

OFFSETS: There is no offset from one print to another, indicating the order in which
they were arranged, but there are very small fragments of larger printed sheets pasted
to the versos of some leaves of poor paper (pls. 6-10, 12-14, 16-17); the printing
(e.g., “effect / standard” on pl. 14 verso) is on the under side of the added paper and
appears as mirror-writing.

COLORING: Only two plates are colored, both on good paper:

pl. 10a) There is smudged Blue watercolor on the sky AND on the cloud at the top behind
the man, and there may perhaps be faint Pink on the cloud below the man’s right
hand.

pl. 11a) Heavy opaque colors, sometimes obscuring the words, color the grass Yellow,
the leaves Green, and the baby orangish Pink. There is a shaft of light from the middle
at the right slanting towards the bottom of the middle left margin, with a little Blue
to the left of the shaft. The opaque coloring has smudged through to the verso.

VARIANTS: Some of the plates are rather faint, and all the borders are wiped clean. As
is common with Blake’s printing, there is no indentation from the plate.

Pl. 11a: The coloring has made the plants at bottom very different, and the last line
of text seems to have been emphasized by hand.

Pl. 12: The lines of the man’s eyes are quite clear, not a solid dark mass, as in most
copies.

Pl. 13: The serpent has one tail, as in Copies A-D, H, M-Q (not three tails as in
Copies E-G, J-L).

CONCLUSIONS: By breakfast time, I had concluded that this seems to be an excellent
photographic facsimile, otherwise unknown, made about 1885 with intent to deceive. When
Blake printed his plates, he carefully wiped most of the borders clean of ink, and of
course the pattern of wiping is different in each copy. But in the duplicates here, pls.
8 and 8a, 10 and 10a, 17, 17a, and 17b, the borders are identical in a way virtually
impossible to achieve manually. Pl. 17b, on whiter paper, shows faint color throughout
the “white” areas, implying a photographic original. The watermark of 1885 indicates
that at least pl. 8a was printed in or after that year. The exact resemblance of the
designs, in every detail I noticed, to undoubted copies of Blake’s originals—cp. illus.
1 and illus. 3, illus. 4 and illus. 6 here—indicates that these facsimiles were made
from photographs. The extremely poor quality of the paper used for most of the prints,
with irrelevant notes and numbers and scraps of paper on the back, suggests that they
were experimental proofs, not intended for sale, and the fact that the coloring was
begun only on prints on better quality paper suggests to me that an attempt was being
made to deceive—though the coloring is quite different from any by Blake which I have
seen. The price of “2/10/-” on pl. 11 may indicate that the prints on better quality
paper were designed by the maker for separate sale.

If one were trying to identify the original from which this facsimile was made, one
should notice (1) that pl. 3 has pl. e with the word “Preludium” printed at the top, as
in Copies C-L, R; (2) that pl. 4 (illus. 3 here) is masked, as in Copies C-M, and that
it is masked 0.3 cm below the man’s toe, as in Copies C, F, H (0.4 cm), and L (0.4cm);
(3) and that the serpent on pl. 13 has one tail, as in Copies A-D, H, M-Q, not three, as
in Copies E-G, J-L. The only copies with all these characteristics are C, D, and H, and
pl. 4 of Copy D is masked in a different way from this facsimile. Copy H has been in the
British Museum Print Room since 1856 and seems to be the most likely candidate.

This is quite different from the Muir facsimile of 1887 (though one leaf of tissue
paper is erroneously inscribed in pencil “America (Muir’s facsimile[)]”) or
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4. America (I) pl. 9 (Huntington Library).
Two of the most curious features of this lovely design are the contrast
between the bellicose words and the Edenic scene, and the apparently detached ankle
and foot visible to the right of the ram’s head.
[View this object in the William Blake Archive]

5. America pl. 9, facsimile like that in Copy B (Robert N.
Essick).
Note that the plate lacks the flying birds under the branches. The border was
wiped free of ink in a manner different than the print in Copy I, especially at the
bottom left, bottom margin, bottom right, and to the right of the tree. The smudges
on the top boy’s cheek, the bottom boy’s calf, the leaf at the bottom right, and
elsewhere are probably produced merely by over-heavy printing. The differences in
the flourish on the “b” of “burnt” (line 1) and the “W” of “Why” (line 7)
could have
been the result of different inking, but the flourish in the “G” of “Gods” (line 6)
is formed differently in the stereotype.

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any other known to me, and it is in most respects far
harder to distinguish from Blake’s originals than any other facsimile. Indeed, without
the 1885 watermark and the duplication of plates with identically wiped borders, I
should have found it extremely difficult to distinguish this from a Blake original.

There is a troubling parallel to this facsimile. In Blake, 16 (1983),
212-23, Joseph Viscomi and Thomas Lange described two facsimile plates (pls. 4 and 9)
previously undetected among the genuine plates of the Pierpont Morgan copy of
America, Copy B. Only three other copies of those two plates are known,
in the collections of Robert N. Essick (pls. 4 and 9—see illus. 2 & 5 here) and
Thomas Lange (pl. 9), and Essick’s came through the hands of Walter T. Spencer, who is
known to have forged the coloring of America Copy Q and
Europe Copy L about 1913. It seems at least possible, then, that pls. 4 and 9
were made for Walter T. Spencer for purposes of commercial deception.

However, the “new” America is distinct from the facsimile plates in
Copy B. Essick and Lange generously compared reproductions of the “new”
America with their copies of the facsimile pls. 4 and 9 and concluded that
their
prints were made from different stereotypes than the corresponding “new” plates.*↤ * I
must depend, with confidence and gratitude, upon the comparisons made by Essick and
Lange, for though I have examined in detail the genuine America
plates, the “new” prints, and the Morgan-Essick-Lange facsimiles of pls. 4 and 9, I
have never been able to examine the “new” plates (or reproductions of them) and the
Morgan-Essick-Lange facsimiles together. They believe that the stereotypes for the “new”
plates were made from lithographs (stone, rather than zinc) onto which the
America outlines were carefully but not flawlessly copied—there are too many
minute differences in proportions and in flourishes of letter-forms and tendrils to make
photography seem likely. The grainy areas were probably traced with a lithographic
crayon and the solid areas with tusche applied with a pen or brush.

They also point out that pl. 1 in the “new” America seems to be
imitated from the proof in Copy a, with all its unique qualities including the
framing-line round the plate, on the backing-mat, of Copy a—and this may have been made
photographically. Copy a, however, includes only pls. 1, 4, 11-12, and 15, and
consequently the “new” America, which reproduces all the plates save
pl. 18, must have been based on models beyond those in Copy a. Copy a was in the hands
of Quaritch and Muir in 1880, and Muir made facsimiles from other prints which were in
the same collection as Copy a (see Blake Books [1977], p. 339). The
“new” facsimile seems therefore to be eclectic, choosing plates from at least two
different copies.

The existence of this excellent facsimile should make us extremely cautious in judging
the authenticity of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing, particularly unwatermarked
plates of America printed in Green: Copy C, pls. 10, 12, 14, 15; Copy
D, pls. 12, 14, 16, 18; Copy E, pls. 1-12, 15-16; Copy F; Copy G, pls. 2, 5-6, 9-18;
Copy I, pls. 1-2, 7-12, 15-18; Copy K, pls. 1-2, 5-18; Copy L (sold as “a facsimile” in
1927); Copy M, pls. 10, 14-16; Copy R (the basis of the Muir facsimile); Copy a, pls.
11-12; pl. 1 (Lister); and pl. 4 (Morgan). Perhaps they too are hitherto unidentified
copies of this late nineteenth century facsimile. Perhaps those copies indifferently
printed or colored are not by Blake or his wife at all; perhaps some of them are
facsimiles so good that they have fooled us all—just as, for almost a hundred years,
pls. 4 and 9 in America Copy B fooled all who saw it, including
myself, until their spuriousness was noticed for reasons other than the inaccuracy of
the printed images by Joseph Viscomi and Thomas Lange. Caveat emptor!

Print Edition

Publisher

Department of English, University of Rochester

Rochester, NY, USA

Editors

Morris Eaves

Morton D. Paley

Bibliographer

Detlef W. Dörrbecker

Review Editor

Nelson Hilton

Associate Editor for Great Britain

Frances A. Carey

Managing Editor

Patricia Neill

Contributors

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

David V. Erdman

Nelson Hilton

Tim Hoyer

Wallace Jackson

Edward Larrissy

Raymond Lister

Morton D. Paley

David Punter

David Scrase

David Simpson

Dena Bain Taylor

Digital Edition

Editors:

Morris Eaves, University of Rochester

Robert Essick, University of California, Riverside

Joseph Viscomi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Project Manager

Joe Fletcher

Technical Editor

Michael Fox

Previous Project Manager and Technical Editor

William Shaw

Project Director

Adam McCune

Project Coordinator, UNC:

Natasha Smith, Carolina Digital Library and Archives

Project Coordinator, University of Rochester:

Sarah Jones

Scanning:

UNC Digital Production Center

XML Encoding:

Apex CoVantage

Additional Transcription:

Adam McCune

Jennifer Park

Emendations:

Rachael Isom

Mary Learner

Adam McCune

Ashley Reed

Jennifer Park

Scott Robinson

XSLT Development:

Adam McCune

Joseph Ryan

William Shaw

PHP and Solr Development:

Michael Fox

Adam McCune

Project Assistants:

Lauren Cameron,

Rachael Isom,

Mary Learner,

Jennifer Park,

Ashley Reed,

Adair Rispoli,

Scott Robinson

Sponsors

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and the University of Rochester